Washington -- John Sopko ticks off certain people. He doesn’t seem to mind.

He upset the Mafia, for one, back when mob wars rocked Cleveland with homemade bombs, bribery and extortion. Winning the federal government’s first big string of racketeering convictions against organized crime in 1982, Sopko, then a young federal prosecutor, ended the Cosa Nostra’s Cleveland reign.

He ticked off some people in Afghanistan more recently, after pointing out corruption, bribery and theft in that country’s ongoing reconstruction. The Kabul Press in February criticized Sopko, who is currently the U.S. government’s inspector general for the reconstruction effort, saying that the corruption he has uncovered there “seems trivial and simplistic” compared with the ways of the Washington Beltway.

And making the circle complete, Sopko, a St. Ignatius and Case Western Reserve University law graduate, apparently has ticked off some in Washington, or he suggested as much during a speech in May. Afghanistan will have to stand on its own once American troops leave, but Sopko keeps pointing out problems that could interfere -- theft, bribery, corruption -- as the State Department, Defense Department and Agency for International Development spend billions hoping things turn out well.

Some people wish he’d shut up.

“In their opinion, my reports should be slipped in a sealed envelope in the dead of night under the door, never to see the light of day,” Sopko, 60, said at an appearance at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank. “Because those reports could embarrass the administration, embarrass President Karzai, embarrass Afghanistan.”

But Sopko, who recently sat down with The Plain Dealer to talk about Afghanistan and the old Cleveland mob, is not shutting up. He has spent nearly all his adult life sifting through muck, first as a prosecutor, then as an investigator and counsel for Senate and House investigative committees and for the Commerce Department. Although he got out of that business for a four-year stint with Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, a prestigious law firm with offices in Washington, he came back to government last July to dig some more, this time for President Barack Obama’s administration as it hopes to rebuild Afghanistan.

Sopko has the authority to root out problems in any agency or department involved in the reconstruction. His predecessor, retired Marine Corps Gen. Arnold Fields, resigned amid criticism that he was not aggressive enough.

“I’m not a cheerleader,” Sopko says. “I’m a watchdog.”

So who is unhappy with what Sopko and his staff of nearly 200, including about 60 in Afghanistan, are finding? The question reverberated from his speech back to lawmakers, and U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who chairs a subcommittee on contracting oversight, said any attempt to impede the inspector general would be “unacceptable and repugnant.”

“We’re definitely keeping a close eye on the situation moving forward,” said McCaskil spokesman Drew Pusateri.

But Sopko says it is not Obama, nor is it the heads of the agencies, who are upset with him. But beyond that, “You name it,” he said in an interview in his Arlington, Va., corner office, with large windows providing expansive views of the Capitol and Washington Monument across the Potomac River. “Somebody who’s got a program. Some of them are squealing because they haven’t had somebody expose the problems. It’s that low-level, mid-level and some senior people just didn’t know and didn’t have experience with an independent inspector general.”

The White House referred a question about this to Laura Lucas, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, who said in an email, “We value the oversight provided by John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR).” She said that “working in a wartime environment such as Afghanistan brings with it many challenges, and the efforts of SIGAR are important for improving our processes and pursuing the best return on U.S. taxpayer dollars possible.”

She makes it sound bureaucratic. It is not.

Harder than in Cleveland

Sopko’s reports to the administration and Congress have been candid and critical. This country’s goal is to help Afghanistan rebuild as a secure, functioning democracy as the international military presence diminishes. But Sopko’s reports on how the money is spent can cast a harsh light on the tactics and motivations of parties on both sides of the transaction.

Recent highlights include a report that the Pentagon is trying to buy $771.8 million worth of planes and helicopters for Afghanistan so it can combat terrorism and the opium and hashish trade -- but that Afghanistan lacks the capacity to fly and maintain the aircraft.

Another Sopko report says Afghanistan, which is supposed to be this country’s partner, is socking U.S. government agencies and contractors with nearly $1 billion in business taxes and penalties. And in April, Sopko reported that the Defense Department had limited assurance that Afghan contractors linked to terrorists had been terminated.

Just as a cop deals with crime and the seamier side of life, it is Sopko’s job to find waste, fraud and abuse. The brighter side is somebody else’s job.

“I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to get through,” he says when asked about the pessimistic view of Afghanistan his reports could leave. “You’ve got to be optimistic. I wouldn’t have taken the job if I was a pessimist.

“But it’s tough,” he acknowledges. “It’s very tough. It’s harder than what we did in Cleveland, let’s just say that. At least we have rule of law here. At least we can do surveillance and not worry about getting shot.”

Sopko invited Douglas Domin, 64, his assistant inspector general for investigations, to join the interview. Domin was an FBI agent in Cleveland who worked on the mob cases, and Sopko handpicked the Chicago native for his current job.

“Doug’s guys,” Sopko says, “when they go out for interviews” in Afghanistan, “are wearing flak jackets and helmets. They kind of stand out a bit. It’s not like going undercover with some mob local in Cleveland. These are tough cases.”

Not that the mob cases were easy.

A make-or-break case

Sopko, whose family moved from Cincinnati to Cleveland’s West Side when he was in sixth grade, started at the federal Organized Crime Strike Force in Cleveland as a 26-year-old, low-level attorney. He had interned there while in law school at Case (he got his bachelor's degree at the University of Pennsylvania) but first had to gain experience with a stint at the Montgomery County prosecutor’s office in Dayton before he could get hired full-time. Back in Cleveland, he started working on union corruption cases involving the Teamsters and International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.

Then two top prosecutors quit, and Sopko was summoned to the boss’s office and told he was being handed cases that would either make or break his career. The names on the files were of Cleveland legend, starting with the mobster at the top, James “Jack White” Livavoli.

“I immediately went down and bought a pack of cigarettes,” Sopko says of the day he got the assignment. “I had quit. I quit smoking in law school, and I started smoking and became a three-pack-a-day guy for like the next three years.”

Licavoli had ordered the killing of a rival who was cutting in on the Mafia’s action, an Irish-American gangster named Danny Greene. Greene was not in the Mafia but nevertheless used muscle and moxie to get his own pieces of union, loan-sharking, garbage-hauling and other enterprises. Licavoli and his associates fumed as Greene’s appetite got bigger.

Federal prosecutors and the FBI were watching as the feud grew. Unknown to Sopko at the time, he says, gangsters including Greene and Teamsters union president Jackie Presser were working their own angles while tipping the FBI about others.

“Wasn’t everybody?” he now laughs when asked about informants.

Several years after Greene died -- in a 1977 car bombing, a final successful hit after previous hits ordered by Licavoli and other enemies failed -- the investigations started yielding results. Sopko ultimately put away Licavoli and his top echelon.

It was the nation’s first successful use of the federal racketeering statute -- RICO, or the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act -- to take down the Mafia’s leadership. The statute was so untested and controversial that the trial judge threw it out at first, Sopko says, allowing prosecutors to continue the trial with only bribery charges. Sopko won some bribery convictions but also appealed the trial judge’s RICO ruling, and won at the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He then brought the mobsters back for a new trial under RICO, winning convictions against Licavoli, John Calandra, Anthony Liberatore, Pasquale “Butchie” Cisternino, Ronald “The Crab” Carabbia and Kenneth Ciarcia.

Along with federal indictments handed up for seven others the day before the Licavoli convictions, this marked the end of the Mafia in Cleveland, according to many accounts. Licavoli died in prison.

Wiretaps yielded ‘nothing’

Clevelanders still tell stories about those days. Sopko and Domin have a storehouse of their own.

Sopko recalled the frustration of planting bugs in gangsters’ cars and offices and then hearing nothing, “This was old-fashioned bugging,” says Sopko, in shirtsleeves, his collar open and tie pulled down. “This isn’t like NSA (National Security Agency) stuff where some guy 1,000 miles away can listen to everything. Some agent risked his life going to a place after midnight, prying in.”

Facing Domin across a round table, he says, “You remember you even joked one time, you were putting some bug in and it was all just dead rats and all that in one of these places?”

Domin, in a blue blazer and with his necktie fully tied, says, “That was at the airport.”

Sopko continues, “We had to tap phones and some guy was there listening. So we would get the affidavits, we would get the judge to sign it. Guys would risk their lives to put these taps in. And we’d get nothing. Nothing. Nothing. How many taps, how many did we do in Youngstown? Nothing! We had the probable cause and were getting nothing.”

It turned out that an FBI clerk had been taking bribes to provide the mob with internal lists and documents, including affidavits that the feds used to get a judge to approve wiretaps. The FBI figured that out while investigating Greene’s murder, when notes on the affidavits turned up in a cereal box hidden at a car dealership. The handwriting looked familiar, and when an agent compared it back at the office, it matched that of the clerk, Geraldine Rabinowitz.

“She gave it up just like that,” Domin says. “We had to put her into protection for a while with her husband, who was a goofball as well.”

“Those two ‘goofballs,’” Sopko protests, “became my key witnesses.”

As for what, exactly, the mob bribed her and her husband with, Domin says, “They sold out for Levi’s.”’

Sopko recalls it was more than jeans: “$13,000, and a loan for $30 (thousand) or something like that, right?” (Court records put the sum at $15,000, although a Cleveland Magazine story in 1978 said one of the mobsters, Ciarcia, lifted $100 from the envelope, leaving the couple with $14,900.)

Domin: “And she had given them her ring from her first marriage that they said they could use as collateral.”

Sopko: “They were cheapskates, the Mafia.”

Great town for the mob

Organized crime had operated in Cleveland since Prohibition, but there were others besides the Mafia and Greene running rackets and competing for action by the 1970s. “The Hells Angels were working with La Cosa Nostra and doing these different bombings and stuff,” says Domin. “So for a variety of different reasons people were getting killed, and it could be a mob interest, it could be a dope interest, depending upon the full circumstances they were working together.”

Yet some in Cleveland refused to acknowledge the Mafia was even there. Mayor Ralph Perk was one, Sopko says.

“During that time, what you don’t appreciate is, there were murders, bombings, missing people, shootings constantly,” Sopko says. “I mean, Cleveland was the murder capital and the bombing capital of the United States. There were so many bombings going on in Cleveland that the ATF (U.S. Bureau of Alcohol. Tobacco and Firearms) regional office in Cincinnati shut down and moved. Because BATF made the determination that it was just cheaper to just move everyone up to Cleveland than to pay the per diem.

“And then you had all of the arsons on the west side, arsons that the mob was involved in. And in the midst of this you had Mayor Perk saying ‘There is no Mafia, there is no mob.’ It was so crazy.”

Sopko left the strike force after the Licavoli case, moving on to equally serious investigations as he worked for the Senate, the House of Representatives and the Commerce Department. He alerted Congress to the risk of stateless terrorism and rogue nuclear, chemical and biological weapons after the the Soviet Union breakup. He explored how the United States treated Soviet defectors. He investigated for Congress how organized crime infiltrated labor unions. He won recognition and accolades.

Yet when asked to name the pinnacle of all his cases and investigations, he shows little hesitation.

“The Licavoli case,” he says. “I was 29, 30 years old. That was the best case.” And he jokes, “I’ve gone downhill since then.”

Blame it on Cleveland, or credit federal law. Afghanistan has no extradition treaty with the United States, no multi-agency crime strike force.

“We’ve got to rely on the Afghan judicial system and Ministry of Justice, and they’re developing,” Sopko says. “And they’re not up to par. Even the Afghans recognize that. And you have corruption that’s rampant. So it’s a hard job.”

And Cleveland?

“It was a great town for the mob,” he says. “It was a good organized crime town.”

His director of public affairs, Philip LaVelle, interjects, “You guys cleaned it up. You wrecked it for everyone else.”

“Yeah,” says Sopko, looking to Domin. “So two old mob fighters get together again. Now we’re going to clean up Afghanistan.”

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